A whistleblower whose identity was revealed in recent TV docudrama Dirty Business obtained figures that revealed Environment Agency (EA) staff have downgraded thousands of serious pollution incidents by water companies in England without investigating.
Freedom of information (FoI) requests submitted by Robert Forrester, who left the agency in January, revealed 2,778 serious pollution incidents by water companies were reported in 2024. Of these, 2,735 (98 per cent) were downgraded to minor incidents by officials.
Officers only attended 496 incidents; the rest were deemed minor events on water company evidence alone, the data suggests.
This represents an almost 1,500 per cent increase on the 174 downgrades in 2021, of which 60 were attended.
Mr Forrester vowed to continue his work after the screening of the Channel 4 programme, and said: “There is a significant increase in the serious incidents received by the agency but a huge increase in them being downgraded with no attendance by an officer. The key thing is that water companies are still controlling our attendance. As an officer with 21 years’ experience I saw it change from 12 to 15 years ago when we would actually get out on site, and we were encouraged to protect, investigate and enforce.”
For the 2025-26 financial year, the EA expects to receive approximately £149m in income from water companies through permit charges and a new enforcement levy, out of a £189m total budget for water regulation.
But Mr Forrester said the model of water companies paying for the budget of agency enforcers created a conflict of interest.
“The regulator is in too close a relationship with the water companies. They are being funded from the money the water companies pay for their permits and as a result the regulator appears to be loosening its regulatory hold over them,” he said.
Forrester left the agency after several years during which he was put under suspension, and given restricted duties, following what he believes were suspicions that he was blowing the whistle.
He first started to expose what he saw as a cosy relationship between the industry and the regulator in 2017, when a report on the toxicity of sewage sludge was kept from public scrutiny.
In 2021, while Forrester was on a 12-month suspension, the then chief executive of the agency, James Bevan, warned all staff against speaking to the media.
The report was eventually published in 2020 in an investigation by Greenpeace, revealing that sewage waste destined for crops in the UK was contaminated with dangerous “persistent organic pollutants” such as dioxins, furans, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons at “levels that may present a risk to human health”.
An EA spokesperson said: “We receive 100,000 reports a year and respond to every water pollution incident, all of which are carefully assessed. We focus our resources on the most serious incidents using all our investigative tools, from real-time data to on-the-ground inspections.
“Using our largest ever budget for water enforcement and compliance, we have fundamentally changed our approach. More people, better data and increased powers mean we are taking action and this year we are on track to do 10,000 inspections of water company assets, rooting out wrongdoing and driving better performance.”
